The Louvre, Paris {Deetour}

Our second day in Paris was a free day, which meant we were free to do whatever we wanted but had to meet up for dinner near the Eiffel Tower. We decided to start with the Louvre.

After breakfast, we rode the tour bus and got off at the Louvre museum. The Louvre is the world’s largest museum and it would apparently take you 100 days to see every piece of art in it, if you take 30 seconds at each piece. 😮  It has over 380,000 pieces in its collection, and not everything is on show.

It’s also world’s most popular museum and has over 15,000 visitors per day, so you can imagine the queue to get in. But our tour guide Ray Ray informed us to avoid the main entrance, where the queue was very long, and to go to two other entrances.

We went to the first one he mentioned, one that involved taking the escalator downstairs, but the queue was also long there. But the inverted pyramid was there! I’m familiar with it thanks to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. 😬 So we took photos before walking off to find the other entrance.

The other entrance was outside, so we walked outside and I was mesmerized by this gorgeous view.

Off in the distance was the Louvre palace and pyramid, one of the most popular Paris landmarks. We walked in that direction to take photos.

There was another really long queue at the entrance here, but this was not the entrance we were looking for. So where was it? We walked beyond the pyramid and looked for a secret entrance called Porte des Lions or Lions’ Gate. “You can’t miss it because it’s guarded by lions,” said the woman we had asked for directions. Thanks to her instructions, we found it! 😊

While the other queues had scores of people, this entrance had less than ten! So we bought our 12 euro tickets and quickly made a beeline for the most famous artwork in the place – the Mona Lisa.

But before we got there, we had to pass by other things, very pretty things worth taking pictures of!

Then finally, we found it! You can’t miss it because of the huge crowd. 😨

If you don’t already know, the Mona Lisa is actually quite small. Its dimensions are 21 x 30 inches, slightly bigger than an A2 piece of paper. It is the most famous piece of art in the Louvre and is so valuable that it’s protected by bulletproof glass and has its own bodyguards. This was probably brought on thanks to the incident of 1911, when it was stolen and returned 2 years later.

Some people would not have braved that crazy crowd, but I decided to jump in, and actually made it to the front.

Mission accomplished!

After that we decided to look for just one more famous artwork – the Venus de Milo. But as usual we had to pass by several other pieces along the way, and I fell in love with the gorgeous painted ceilings we saw when we took a wrong turn somewhere.

We also stumbled upon another sculpture with a missing body part.

We eventually found Venus, but there were so many people and the light was so harsh that it was difficult to take a decent photo.

Then we decided to hightail it out of there so we can see the rest of Paris.

Next stop: Champs Elysees. To read all my Paris entries, start with Bonjour, Paris or check out my travelogues page or this tag: #europe.